Used to be the only foreigner in a Chinese company. Developed some techniques and some hacky apps I built for myself to help me advance.

Things that worked for me:
- In every meeting or discussion, listen as attentively as possible and write down new words. Clip directly to a Pleco deck if people don't mind you being on your phone, or write them down and clip later.

Print out your emails like an old man. Underline unfamiliar/new words. Copy by hand, and finally add to Pleco. Recommend a "work" deck.

On Sundays, go buy some industry trade rags at the bookstore. They're super cheap (compared to in the west). Even if the thought of reading a whole magazine in Chinese makes you tired, you will find it goes by easier because it's something you're interested in. Go to a comfy coffeeshop, bring a pen and highlighter, and go over a few articles. Highlight the unfamiliar words, then go back in with a dictionary and read the same sentences again. Finally, copy the ones that actually seem useful down, and then into your Pleco deck. Suggest making a new deck for the article so that you remember the context.

Follow your industry on Zhihu.

In your group chats, copy and paste messages and clip new words into a deck. Never translate. I actually wrote my own tool for this that also displays Pinyin because Pleco's reader mode was way too troublesome to actually flip to hundreds of times a day this way.

Tons of words I found in my workplace had no dictionary definition that was actually accurate for the sense the word was being used in. Sometimes you just have to figure it out and ask people. I actually go in and define custom cards for these.

Don't learn from the text 《商业汉语提高》. It has some relevant stuff, but it's mostly about toasting people at banquets and launching lines of cosmetic products. Don't know why I wasted so much time with that. I was surprised how thorough and up-to-date the official 标准教程 from Hanban was and wish I had used that instead.

If you are in a meeting and understood 75-80%, actually ask some questions in Chinese, even if they are dumb, and you don't care about that particular meeting. Even if you have been studying for years and demonstrated your language ability, you are still fighting against the weird presumption that you understand 0% because you are a different race. If other people put you in that bucket, and something comes up that relates to your projects, most people will just never tell you at all (due to lack of professionalism/social skills). So you need to constantly OVER-project that you're being diligent, you have SOME language ability, etc, even if it feels ridiculous.

When you have new colleagues (especially those not directly tied up in your projects), begin talking to them exclusively in Chinese. People will gravitate to the language you used the first few times you spoke to them, even if their English is fluent. Get in the habit of shooting the shit with these people. You will find every conversation you hear a useful new word, and it will be much, much easier to remember it even without writing it down.

Now, on your subway rides, hopefully you'll have a bunch of Pleco decks with words from various contexts/situations. Set up a couple profiles for different studying. My default was to mostly study whatever chapter I was studying that week in lessons, with a good mix of my work decks thrown in. Just set it up to give you 20-50 cards per go, nothing too intense.

Regularly cull your Pleco decks. Some of the words you clipped are dumb and won't come up. You want to economize on that subway studying time! If you feel bad deleting, just move them to a "graveyard" deck. I built a tool to do this automatically, based on word frequency data, but it's fine manually as well.

I lost some amount of motivation after realizing how wrapped up the language is to race and nationality.

While blue-collar folks are delighted to meet foreigners who can speak the language, there is a weird thing among educated people where (racially non-Chinese) foreigners are always assumed to be fresh-off-the-boat-don't-know-what's-going-on regardless of level. Like it is assumed it would be impossible for us to know any Chinese, even if we've clearly studied for years and demonstrated the fact.

It's interesting, Chinese would never judge a person for not speaking Mandarin the way that a French or American might judge someone for living abroad and not attempting to speak the language. Why is that?

Sometimes it seems like the vision of "internationalization" that China seems to strive for is not one where people around the world learn the language and culture and integrate. Rather, the idea is that more people should learn English as an "external interface" for foreigners, and retain Mandarin for internal use. The notion of foreigners actually learning Mandarin in earnest just does not compute with anyone.

To advance in your level of Mandarin past a certain point while living in China requires constant stubbornness and resistance of not only the human tendency to use one's native language, but this odd cultural notion held by some that foreigners should be kept separate somehow and interfaced with in foreign languages.

At the same time, foreigners with Asian appearance have a complete double standard where people think they're just dumb or something for not knowing the language. It seems bizarre to people, for instance, that someone of Chinese race born and raised in the US who is visiting for the first time might not speak the language.

This is not true of all people, and there are many I've gotten along with just fine without encountering any of this attitude, but it's definitely a force to contend with if you really get serious about using the language for real work/discourse.

I've always went running in Guangzhou if the PM is under 180. Anything above that makes it difficult to run, and I feel is harmful. I agree with the article that any running or biking outside health benefit will always outweigh pollution. I think of it in RPG stats. Running is +5 points for your heart, +2 mental health, +2 Appearance and +1 Diabetes Resistance, with pollution being a debuff of -1.

Hey, author here! Surprised to see this piece here! Actually, the thesis I am trying to make in the article is not that WeChat is necessarily superior, but that chat apps are filling voids created by OS designers falling asleep at the wheel for the past few years.

A Chinese friend of mine was shocked that something like 老炮儿 made it past censors. When I saw it, I enjoyed it but figured "of course a movie like this would be produced and not held back". It seemed completely in tune with the current rhetoric around the issue. I'm sure this will be the same. Looking forward!

I have had fantastic results with Shadowsocks + my own VPS. Using a package called Streisand (https://github.com/jlund/streisand) to run it. I use it on all my devices, Wifi or 3G no problems, as if I never left the US. And it's smart enough to bypass the proxy for Chinese sites. Don't worry about connecting/disconnecting, just set it and forget it.

The only issue is that Netflix realizes my VPS is at a known data center, so I get the normal error message. I switch to Astrill for Netflix, but they seem to have picked up on most of Astrill's endpoints. Usually I have to pick a tier 2 US city like Phoenix or Denver whose data center they don't know about it. When I get around to it, will probably run some experiments and move the Streisand instance to some other data center that Netflix doesn't know about and resume using that for everything.

There's a song on constant loop in the Guangzhou APM that I have also heard on other cities' mass transit, as well as on customer service numbers. It's not the Kenny G one and fits the rhythm in your post. Have no clue!